“The entitlement state now means that people think businesses should be subsidized when they’re going under, such as Chrysler and GM. It means that despite the fact that we’re pouring a lot of money into aboriginal affairs, people think the remedy for the poor social indicators is even more money in even more remote locations,” he said.

People think the remedy for the poor social indicators is even more money in even more remote locations

Although the tax burden has decreased from the late ‘90s, Mr. Milke said Canadians are still paying too much compared to other OECD states. The country is more heavily taxed now than it was during Pierre Trudeau’s era.

Mr. Milke released the first edition of Tax Me I’m Canadian! in 2002 when he was a director with the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. He’s since become a fellow at the Fraser Institute. His new book, which launched Monday in Calgary, features 80% new material.

In the new edition, Mr. Milke argues that jurisdictions that hinder the resource sector are in fact hampering their efforts to pay for increasingly pricey pensions and programs.

“There’s a lack of understanding about what brings home the economic bacon in Canada, and it ain’t windmills and it ain’t hiring more government workers. It’s men and women who are in the resource sector.”

Even Alberta is moving to address public-sector pension liabilities. In Newfoundland, Mr. Milke said, the government recently allocated $2-billion to the teachers’ pension fund.

“That was the equivalent of two-and-a-half years of personal income tax revenue in the province,” he said. “Ontario did the same thing. The Ontario government will be putting $2.1-billion into the Ontario public service pension plan — that $2.1-billion could buy a subway extension in the city of Toronto.”

That $2.1-billion could buy a subway extension

Mr. Milke said the Fathers of Confederation always envisioned Canada as a low-tax haven.

“They always thought it was a good idea for Canada to have much lower taxes than the U.S. because, even back then, competition for immigration and skilled workers was fierce,” he said.

Mr. Milke insists he is not anti-tax, and acknowledges moderate taxation is required.

“But in reality, we’ve moved from a welfare state to an entitlement state where many politicians and too many Canadians think there’s an endless pot of gold out there,” he said.

While corporate welfare is lining the pockets of Canadian aerospace firms and even rural pizzerias, many of the country’s top employers have not collected a cent, says a new analysis by the Fraser Institute.

“You can’t blame the companies; if politicians are silly enough to offer up taxpayer cash, those companies will seek it and hire the lobbyists to get it,” said Mark Milke, a senior fellow at the institute.

Tuesday’s 15-page report is his sixth on corporate welfare.

Since 1961, Industry Canada and its successors have doled out an inflation-adjusted $22-billion in grants, loans and various “contributions” to private companies, based on Access to Information requests filed by Fraser Institute researchers.

Quebec transportation heavyweight Bombardier has pulled in $1.1-billion since securing its first Industry Canada payout in 1966. Another $1-billion was collected by de Havilland, makers of the iconic de Havilland Beaver single-engine bush plane.

At the same time, the country’s top three employers, Onex Corp., George Weston Ltd. and Loblaw Cos. were paid nothing. Collectively, the three keep 536,000 people on the payroll.

Of Canada’s top 25 employers, in fact, only five had received Industry Canada contributions.

Industry Canada payouts were but a sliver of the total subsidies handed out by Canadian governments in the same time period.

If politicians are silly enough to offer up taxpayer cash, those companies will seek it and hire the lobbyists to get it

The figures do not include any provincial and territorial subsidies, as well as the $14-billion federal/Ontario bailout for Chrysler and General Motors in 2009. It also leaves out “most” of Ottawa’s much-advertised $63-billion Economic Action Plan, said Mr. Milke.

A 2009 Fraser Institute accounting of all government subsidies in 1994-2007, for instance, tallied up more than $202-billion.

However, the point of the exercise was to figure out whether there were “repeat offenders, so to speak, at the public trough,” said Mr. Milke.

At the same time, his report notes a bizarre smattering of small-scale Industry Canada payouts to hot dog stands, ice cream shops, gas stations and pizzerias.

Related

Over the years, 24 payouts totalling $856,570 have been handed to ice cream shops, while $1.3-million went to subsidize pizzerias, some of them in rural centres such as Le Pas, Man., and Indian Brook, N.S.

“These smaller disbursements … signal how successive governments spent tax dollars not only on the smallest of businesses, but on the civil servants necessary to parse through such requests to then deny or approve them,” the report reads.

Said Mr. Milke, “it boggles the mind to think that somebody in Ottawa thought it was a good idea to have a federal department to sift through grants for $5,000 or $10,000 — and that there was some kind of market value in the provision of ice cream in this country.”

The abolition of “corporate welfare” has been embraced by both sides on the political aisle.

The term was popularized by David Lewis, then-New Democratic Party leader, who campaigned against “corporate welfare bums” during the 1972 federal election.

Talk of corporate welfare was resurrected in June, 2004, when then-Opposition leader Stephen Harper told the Toronto Board of Trade, as prime minister, he would “get out of the grants and subsidies game.”

Instead, the practice has continued unabated since the Conservatives were elected in 2006.

In a paper published last month, the Institute for Research on Public Policy claimed Canada is seeing a “resurgence of industrial policy.”

With Alberta politics taking a turn to the “right,” it is guaranteed that Canadians soon will be hearing more fear-mongering about how Albertan fiscal conservatism is an imported U.S. creed, and thus somehow “un-Canadian.”

The term “fiscal conservatism” describes an attachment to property rights, the rule of law, free trade, sensible (and not overweening) regulation, light debt and a moderate tax structure. Such an orientation rejects the notion that every private problem can be solved through taxpayer money.

In fact, these ideas pre-date Canada, and come both from our classic liberal British heritage (and also from the “liberty” side of the impetus for the 1789 French revolution). More recently, the preference for fiscal conservatism revived first, not in Alberta, but in my native province of British Columbia.

Consider privatization, for example. In the late 1970s, British Columbia’s Social Credit government under Premier Bill Bennett started bundling together, in one entity, companies and assets that the NDP had previously nationalized. The holding company, the British Columbia Resources Investment Corporation (BCRIC), was then distributed to each British Columbian in the form of five free BCRIC shares with additional shares available for purchase.

Or consider another conservative notion: limited government. The first government to try to limit the size and scope of government after the expansionist 1960s and 1970s was again Bennett’s, starting in 1983 with its “restraint” program. That was a full decade before budget reductions were a glint in the eye of Ralph Klein, and 12 years before Mike Harris took power in Ontario.

Insofar as anyone wants to “blame” someone for upsetting the high-tax, nationalizing, protectionist and interventionist apple cart in Canada — Bennett and his colleagues in British Columbia should be the ones who get the blame (or, as I see it, credit).

Not only were the pioneering West Coast ideas later picked up by other governments in Canada — including Brian Mulroney’s Tories (privatization), the Saskatchewan NDP, the federal Liberals and Ontario Conservatives (getting budgets to balance, and then lowering taxes) — the ideas spread worldwide, in conjunction with others (Milton Friedman being the most obvious) also plumping for such policy.

Michael Walker, then executive director for the Fraser Institute and an advisor to the B.C. government in the late 1970s and early 1980s, told me in a recent conversation that when 10 Downing Street, under prime minister Margaret Thatcher, looked for solutions to their nationalized industries, “they came to B.C. and the Fraser Institute to get the scoop on the British Columbia Resources Investment Corporation.”

Going back further, small-government ideas that foment opportunity and prosperity were embraced by Canada’s founding fathers.

Canada’s first post-Confederation Liberal finance minister, Sir Richard Cartwright, provides an example. In an 1878 speech, he makes clear that limited government is preferable to large government: “It is the sacred duty of the government to take only from the people what is necessary to the proper discharge of the public service; and that taxation in any other mode is legalized robbery.”

Or consider a late 19th-century speech in favour of a general preference for freedom: “The good Saxon word, freedom; freedom in every sense of the term, freedom of speech, freedom of action, freedom in religious life and civil life and last but not least, freedom in commercial life.”

That 1894 speech was not, as might be presumed, delivered by some “right-wing” or “Albertan” ideologue. It was then-opposition leader, and later Liberal prime minister, Sir Wilfrid Laurier (who represented the riding of Quebec East). “Conservatism,” whatever its current label and regardless of what political party hews close or far from it, is an inherently Canadian concept, even if these days, it finds its most outspoken defenders in Alberta.

Canada’s Conservative government deserves praise on a number of fronts. Since coming to power, the Tories have ended the reflexively relativist approach to foreign policy, tackled supposedly politically sensitive immigration issues and understood and promoted the need for private-sector jobs, especially in the energy sector.

Thus, when David Frum wrote, in his Saturday National Post column, that “under Stephen Harper, Canada can fairly claim to be the best-governed country among advanced democracies in the world,” he was not far off the mark.

However, where Frum was mistaken was in declaring that “Thursday’s federal budget locks up Canada’s lead.”

That is true only in comparison to basketcase countries that allowed their fiscal problems to linger so long that emergency reforms were unavoidable. But that comparison unintentionally damns the Tories with faint praise.

Frum’s praise for Ottawa’s go-slow approach on balanced books is premised on the perception that if Ottawa actually cut spending (as opposed to slowing the rate of growth) such actions would endanger our prosperity: “If you reduce spending too fast, you crimp your economy,” wrote Frum.

But that’s a mistaken notion.

To use just one example from a large body of research, in 2009, leading fiscal policy expert and Harvard University professor Alberto Alesina and his colleague Silvia Ardagna reviewed stimulus initiatives in Canada and 20 other industrialized countries from 1970 to 2007. In the 91 instances where governments tried to stimulate the economy, it turned out the unsuccessful attempts generally were the ones based on increased government spending. Alesina noted that “a one percentage point higher increase in the current [government] spending-to-GDP ratio is associated with a 0.75 percentage point lower growth.”

To see how Ottawa’s own stimulus spending was unnecessary, consider how Canada emerged from the last recession and how government stimulus spending had nothing to do with it. Our recession ended in mid-2009; it was only about then that federal and provincial governments started spending extra (borrowed) stimulus cash.

To credit stimulus spending for the end to Canada’s recession, one must argue that extra (borrowed) dollars mostly spent after June 2009 somehow magically rescued the Canadian economy before June 2009.

All the borrowing did have one effect: It added to the existing large federal debt mountain, forecast to hit $614-billion in 2015, up from $457-billion in 2008.

It is in that context that the 2012 federal budget should be placed and graded.

The federal Conservatives now forecast balanced federal books by 2015 — six years after the 2009 recession ended. In contrast, in the 1990s, prime minister Jean Chrétien’s government reformed spending rapidly; that is why Liberal budgets went from red to black ink in just three years.

Regrettably for future generations, with that Liberal-era exception noted, federal and provincial governments have long preferred to run deficits.

Since 1947 (as far back as Finance department statistics go on such matters) and onward to 2012, the federal government has recorded deficits in 45 of 65 years — two out of every three postwar years on average. In the provinces, a comparison is unavailable before the mid-1980s, but the pattern is also clear: Over the last 26 years, the provinces have collectively run up deficits in 19 years, or about four out of every five years.

Yes, extraordinary events such as recessions, depressions and wars severely restrict fiscal choices. But those factors are not in play most years. Since the Second World War, Canada has experienced eight recessions, most lasting less than a year.

Contrary to what David Frum argues, there is no danger in getting to balanced federal books quicker. Just the opposite: It is inter-generationally irresponsible to take the opposite approach.

Imagine two small Ontario towns. One is a reserve that blocks an outside investigation into its $31.2-million annual operating budget. That town, Attawapiskat First Nation, has 1,549 people on the reserve according to the last census.

Now imagine another town, a non-native one, where recent budget estimates peg its annual operating expenditures at $8.4-million. That’s the township of Atikokan, near Thunder Bay, with 3,293 people

Careful readers will notice that the larger town, Atikokan, has a much smaller operating budget than does Attawapiskat.

Where the money is spent is also curious. According to Attawapiskat’s latest budget documents, $11.2-million went to salaries, wages and employee benefits. That equates to $7,249 per reserve resident for compensation.

In contrast, according to the latest available estimates from Atikokan, that town spends just less than $3-million on salaries and benefits, or $904 per person.

That contrast might explain the resistance by some to a third-party investigation into the finances of Attawapiskat First Nation. After all, one might reasonably ask this question: given Atikokan spent $3-million on compensation for all city staff, why must Attawapiskat spend $11.2-million? That’s an $8.2-million difference, some of which could have paid for needed housing in the Attawapiskat reserve.

Here’s another contrast. In Atikokan, (for the fiscal year ending in December 2009), the mayor’s salary was $7,713 with travel expenses of $4,268. The total cost to taxpayers thus just less than $12,000. In fact, the total for salaries and expenses for Atikokan’s mayor and seven councillors was just $46,691.

On the Attawapiskat reserve (for the fiscal year ending in March 2010) the chief’s salary alone was $51,803. In total, salaries for Attawapiskat’s chief, deputy chief and 18 councillors that year amounted to $386,129. With $28,535 in expenses, the total cost to taxpayers was $414,664. In the next fiscal year, that cost jumped to $615,552 — a 48% increase.

The Attawapiskat-Atikokan comparison isn’t the only useful contrast. Consider other northern Canadian towns that are also not reserves. In 2010, the northern Alberta town of Athabasca, with a population of 2,575, had an operating budget of $5.5-million. It spent just over $1.6-million on wages and benefits for all city staff, council included, or $644 per Athabascan. The village of Valemount, B.C., with 1,018 people, has an annual operating budget of $3.2-million. It paid out $811,852 in compensation-related expenses, or $797 per capita.

If the City of Toronto spent as much on wages, salaries and benefits as Attawapiskat, Toronto’s remuneration bill would have been $20.1-billion in 2010, as opposed to $4.8-billion (and its curiously high $1,741 per capita figure).

Such comparisons should be recalled by everyone when Chief Shawn Atleo from the Assembly of First Nations, and Attawapiskat chief Theresa Spence mount the rhetorical barricades and urge everyone to move on without “assigning blame,” which is a dodge. Or when they blame “colonialism.”

A lack of money isn’t the problem. Rather, it’s how that money is spent. With the exception of obvious short-term help for the people of Attawapiskat in winter — to make up for past monies that were spent on a large bureaucracy instead of housing — more money won’t solve anything.

Instead, a long-term strategy is needed with the following elements: accountability for money spent; eventual transfers directly to individual natives with money then taxed back for band services; and property rights for individual natives on reserves, which would help instill accountability, entrepreneurship and pride.

Lastly, realism is needed about the fact so many reserves are not economically viable. For the past two centuries, people around the world have moved from rural areas to the cities. Similarly, many people on reserves (mostly in rural areas) need to find their way close to educational, economic and social opportunities in proximity to major population centres, if not for themselves, then certainly for their kids. Such opportunities are why the majority of First Nations people, 57% of them, already choose to live off-reserve.

The challenge for politicians, native and non-native alike, is to remove existing incentives for people to stay on remote reserves, and to provide transitional help those same people move closer to opportunities.

National Post

Mark Milke is a senior fellow with the Fraser Institute and author of Life is Better in the Cities, which compares economic and social indicators on reserves with those of urban Canada.

The federal government spends almost $12-billion annually on aboriginal matters, with much of it transferred to First Nations for governance, education, infrastructure and income assistance. That figure doesn’t include spending by other levels of government, but given the amount of just federal tax dollars at stake, Ottawa’s new legislation to require transparency and accountability on reserves makes eminent sense.

Under the just-tabled Bill C-27, reserves would be required to publish regular audited financial statements. They will also need to make public the salaries and expense account reimbursements paid to reserve politicians.

Earlier this year, when member of Parliament Kelly Block introduced a similar private member’s bill (upon which the new government bill was based), some First Nations chiefs tried to change the subject.

The best example was Assembly of First Nations Chief Shawn Atleo. In March, Atleo argued that Block’s bill ignored important issues. He cited how the federal government has made only limited progress in carrying out education programs for reserve-based students.

Bringing up education on reserves — or water, which is also flagged on occasion — doesn’t change how those services often suffer precisely because of how some First Nations leaders spend public money: on unreasonable salaries and unjustifiable expenses given the small populations of most reserves.

To use one example, in 2008-09, a Manitoba band council’s four positions at the 535 person Ochi-Chak-Ko-Sipi First Nation (Crane River) reserve garnered salaries that ranged from the taxable equivalent of $106,000 to $144,000.

That example, and others that originally spurred Ottawa’s transparency legislation, came from the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. The CTF showed 600 chiefs earned more than $100,000 in 2008-09; many earned more than provincial premiers while 50 chiefs earned the same or more than the prime minister, when the tax-free aspect of reserve salaries was calculated (a smaller tax-free income can easily equal or surpass a much larger income that is taxed by various levels of government).

In response, the Assembly of First Nations argued the CTF numbers (obtained through Access to Information) included travel expenses and per diems. The AFN also claimed that “only” 21 chiefs earned more than premiers and that no one earned more than the prime minister. But in the Crane River example, the average council position incurred $23,210 in travel expenses in addition to the high salaries. The AFN also overlooked honorariums and other remuneration paid to First Nations chiefs, amounts that must also factor into any comparison with the prime minister and premiers.

Canada’s taxpayers off and on-reserve should side with the official government numbers obtained by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, especially given Chief Atleo’s other attempt to criticize attempts to introduce more accountability for reserve governments.

Back in the spring, Atleo asserted that First Nations communities do want to hold their own governments accountable. He said it was just that federal legislation was “another example of giving greater power and responsibility to the Minister of Indian Affairs. What we want to do is give more power to the people.”

To be sure, plenty of people on reserves desire to hold reserve governments accountable. For example, Chief Darcy Bear of Saskatchewan’s Whitecap Dakota First Nation has welcomed the new legislation and asserts it means more accountability.

But Atleo’s logic is akin to a corporate CEO who argues federal laws that require annual financial reports and proper accounting give greater power to the Finance Minister instead of to shareholders.

Nonsense. What such laws do, whether vis-à-vis business or First Nation governments, is require that shareholders and residents be given transparency and actual hard numbers.

The AFN has argued the average of a chief’s salary across Canada is modest. They’ve tossed around the figure of “just” $36,845. If that sounds reasonable, think again. It’s not so reasonable considering the small populations of most reserves. According to the 2006 census, even the largest reserve in the country, Ontario’s Six Nations of the Grand River, had just 22,649 people. Nationally, more than 82% of reserves contained fewer than 1,000 people. Thus, salaries and expense account reimbursements on reserves should parallel off-reserve other hamlets, villages and small cities.

The department of Aboriginal and Northern Affairs is itself subject to proactive disclosure. The minister’s salary is public, as are department travel expenses and contract costs. Similar transparency is long overdue for First Nations politicians.

National Post

Mark Milke is a senior fellow with the Fraser Institute and the author of several studies on aboriginal issues.

Does ethical oil exist? Last week, Jonathan Kay (The Problem With Ethical Oil, Sept. 22) argued “no” and asserted “oil sands boosters” merely cater to the self-interest of the energy industry. While it’s obvious no object can be virtuous — a sharp blade can cut a person open for surgery or be used in a murder — the ethical oil tag is useful shorthand for why Canada’s oil is preferable to that extracted elsewhere.

This is clear if one understands how national interest, limited choices, morality and markets intersect. On the question of interest, of course energy companies (and Canada) benefit monetarily from more oil sales to the United States.

But just as important is the long-term interest of America and Western countries in general.

Related

When Iran’s theocratic revolution took place in 1979, and when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, the result was that just over 6% of America’s oil imports stopped in both instances and for obvious reasons.

That was manageable. But imagine if the oil flow was instead shut off from Saudi Arabia. In 1991, when the first Gulf War started, the Saudi’s accounted for almost one-quarter of American oil imports. Had that stopped suddenly, the United States and the world would have been hit by a massive economic shock. Thus, until oil can realistically be replaced by another energy source, it is in America’s interest to have a more secure supply, and that means Canada.

On intertwined ethics and interest, like it or not, it’s easier for people and nations to do the right thing when they’re not at the mercy of the ethically challenged. For example, if Europe didn’t need Russia’s natural resources, that continent’s governments could more easily challenge Russia’s political leaders on their anti-democratic, anti-liberal ways.

Similarly, it’s to the benefit of the United States, especially as a superpower with a foreign policy tradition of both interests and also Wilsonian-style idealism, to be as independent of unsavoury regimes as is possible. Canada is of critical importance to such an end. In that wider and farsighted context, Canada’s oil is indeed ethical.

Mark Milke is a senior fellow with the Fraser Institute and author of In America’s National Interest: Canadian Oil.

Despite 22 years of free trade with Americans, consumers in Canada regularly pay more than Americans for comparable items. “Canadians are irritated when they see large price discrepancies on the exact same products being sold on different sides of the border,” stated Finance Minister Jim Flaherty. “I share their irritation.” He asked a Senate committee to study the problem.

Sending an issue to a committee can be code for “make it go away.” But, proceeding on the assumption the Minister was sincere and serious about allowing open markets to function, here are three suggestions for the federal and provincial governments on enacting consumer-friendly policy.

First, eliminate “supply management boards.” For consumers unaware of what these entities do, here’s a description courtesy of the B.C. Egg Marketing Board: “Supply management creates an orderly marketing system through collaboration among Canadian farmers and the provincial and federal governments.”

Related

For example, insofar as dairy producers are protected from new domestic and international competition, it’s no surprise eggs, milk and cheese are more expensive in Canada than in the United States. The very existence of supply management boards acts as a break on competition and thus prevents lower prices; they are fundamentally anti-consumer.

It’s more than a little ironic that if businesses attempted to “collaborate” and form a cartel on their own — say, if supermarkets colluded and conspired to never engage in price wars — they’d be prosecuted. Somehow it’s OK if governments first sanction and then actively protect monopolistic behaviour.

A second useful reform would be for Ottawa to unilaterally remove tariffs and duties at the U.S border. When governments stop punishing consumers for bringing back goods from the United States, businesses here — including American-based corporations that can charge Canadians higher prices by virtue of that border — will need to match the prices on the American side. It’s that or lose customers.

From big-ticket items such as automobiles right down to books, the Canadian-American price differential will quickly shrink when the only border duty is the sales tax you’d anyway pay in Canada. Also, to level the playing field for business here vis-à-vis consumers, Ottawa should exempt businesses from paying duties and tariffs on goods to which they are now applied.

Third, the provincial governments should scrap their own cartels. For example, most provinces still operate on the presumption that a government monopoly or a shared public-private duopoly in liquor stores (where private retailers are allowed but new entrants are restricted) is somehow beneficial. Also, it’s technically illegal to even transport alcoholic beverages over provincial borders, including delivery by parcel. That antiquated law and provincially-sanctioned liquor cartels are both part of the reason why wine, beer and spirits cost consumers more in Canada than in the United States.

And if the obvious economic logic on government-created and protected monopolistic cartels — they punish consumers through higher prices — isn’t enough to move fellow politicians, here’s another angle: Higher prices hurt the poor. When agricultural products are priced higher because of “supply management boards,” when tariffs are applied to clothes, and when automobile prices are kept high because of duties, it is the poorest of consumers who suffer most.

Those Canadians are the ones who live paycheque to paycheque. They are the ones most hurt by artificially high prices as food, clothes and transportation form the largest part of their limited budgets. That’s the best reason to enact consumer-friendly policies.

With barely 10% of the seats in the House of Commons held by the Liberal party, Canada’s former natural governing party faces a long road back to electoral success. Such a return to power is even more unlikely if the party follows the advice of its president, Alfred Apps, who recently suggested Liberals try to entrench “positive” rights in the Charter. Good luck with that: So-called positive rights are nothing more than the “right” to have government continually intervene against others on one’s behalf.

Apps’ suggested plan of action would be a mistake precisely because the Liberals have tried it before. For decades they pursued victories at any cost and through the machinery of government. In so doing, they stopped being true liberals.

Initially many liberal causes made sense. For example, on the social front, in abolishing historic racial injustices in law, and by promoting equality for women, liberalism’s original animating principle — the individual should, by default, be deferred to — won. And happily so.

But where liberalism ran into trouble was in its overreach, in its default use of activist government to pursue too many ends. Liberalism as a movement became addicted to government as a vehicle and as a remedy for all that ails us. It did so despite consequences for individual rights, electoral democracy and regardless of whether all late-era liberal causes should have been embraced.

For example, Trudeau’s 1970s-era economics — wage and price controls and nationalized energy companies — never made sense. The state was always incapable of fine-tuning inflation by wage fiat; it was always ill-positioned to run an oil company. More recently, liberalism also resorted to the courts and the bureaucracy once too often instead of making the case for change in our democratically-elected legislatures. Here, think of the overreach on speech issues by incorrectly labelled “human rights” commissions and tribunals.

Or consider racial, ethnic and gender quotas. You can be for equality of opportunity; that’s what the original civil rights movement was about. Or you can be for equality of result. You can’t be both. Early liberal victories quashed legal discrimination based on gender, skin colour and ethnicity. The later liberal program awarded university spots and jobs based on those same factors (and many liberals still defend the same). Liberalism and state power thus colluded to deny individuals a chance to fairly compete and win or lose on merit. All of a sudden, it again mattered what you looked like.

To see how far the later 20th and early 21st-century version of small or big-L liberalism moved away from earlier positions, consider this speech from one of the Liberal party’s earliest leaders, Wilfrid Laurier: “The good Saxon word, freedom; freedom in every sense of the term, freedom of speech, freedom of action, freedom in religious life and civil life and last but not least, freedom in commercial life.” Laurier’s views were consistent with liberalism’s historic mission since at least John Stuart Mill: more freedom for the individual vis-à-vis any collective which might seek to constrain her.

When, over the 20th century, liberalism succumbed to the temptation of ever-more government intervention, the more classic liberal principles and remedies were instead embraced by conservatives.

That development is why modern conservatives have more in common with classic liberalism than do self-professed liberals. And it’s why liberalism and then its institutional cousin, the Liberal party, hit the intellectual and then political shoals. After the abandonment of Mill’s variety of liberalism, it was only a matter of time until that fact caught up with a movement and party that left a more individual-defending variety of liberalism to others.

Milton Friedman once said his greatest fear about the 1979 U.S. government bailout of Chrysler was not that it would fail, but that it would succeed. Chrysler’s rescue, he said, might lead some to draw the wrong conclusion — that such actions save jobs.

That’s one wrong conclusion. Here’s another, courtesy of Industry Minister Christian Paradis on Wednesday: that Chrysler paid back its entire loan from taxpayers. In a department news release, Paradis claimed that Chrysler repaid its loan “in full and ahead of schedule.”

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/another-chrysler-billion-was-lost-in-canada/feed/0stdMark Milke: Public safety is the most important goal of crime policyhttp://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/mark-milke-public-safety-is-the-most-important-goal-of-crime-policy
http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/mark-milke-public-safety-is-the-most-important-goal-of-crime-policy#commentsWed, 23 Mar 2011 11:45:08 +0000http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/?p=32178

By Mark Milke

In early March, Calgary police issued a public warning about a just-released, high-risk sex offender. Derek Ross Calf-Child served 56 months for what the criminal justice system now labels, rather dyspeptically, “sexual assault causing bodily harm.” (Before morally neutral language was applied to modern crime, this was called violent rape.)

The police gave a physical description, and also this summary: “Calf-Child has a lengthy criminal history that includes assaults on women and girls.” The police noted the convicted sex offender was placed under a peace bond, and would be monitored for two years.

I could list a litany of such recent warnings in Calgary alone, never mind elsewhere. Calf-Child is merely an archetype of what many Canadians think is wrong with the criminal justice system. It is why those same Canadians likely are skeptical of the entreaties of Conrad Black, who regularly inveighs against the Conservative government’s plan to spend more money on prisons.

To be clear and fair, Black makes no excuse for the type of criminal just described. In his recent National Post column (“The purpose of prison,” March 12), Black makes a point of clarifying that “the most dangerous, repulsive and sociopathic criminal acts” are exempt from his general plea for prisons to be repair shops for criminals, and not “garbage dumps.”

Well and good. But that caveat, like the mild decrease in Canadian crime rates that Black and others regularly cite, does not justify the notion the Harper government’s proposals (including longer mandatory sentences and less flexibility for judges) represent, as Black writes, a “reactionary and brutish reflex.”

There’s a reason the public believes some judges are too soft and some sentences too short. Go back five decades, and the overall rate of crime was three times higher than it is now. As for the violent crime rate, it is now five times that of its 1962 equivalent.

Statistics Canada notes that the number of violent crimes reported to police in 2009 totalled 443,284. But in another StatsCan study, nearly 1.6 million Canadians said they’d suffered through a violent crime in the preceding 12 months — meaning that most crime isn’t reported to police.

Those 1.6-million Canadians represent “only” 6% of those aged 15 and over. But given that violent crime consists of sexual assault, robbery and physical assault, it’s hardly a negligible figure, nor inconsequential for those attacked.

Even so-called “minor” crime such as automobile theft or a home break-in can be problematic for individuals and a community. In a 2008 National Post story, Brian Hutchinson noted how one Vancouver criminal, William Edward Marshall, had been arrested hundreds of times and convicted 148 times since 1979.

Because Marshall’s crimes were “only” property crimes, he kept receiving revolving-door 30-to-90-day sentences. Vancouver cops were so frustrated with local judges that they released a 44-page report on that city’s chronic offenders. It revealed that “after 30 or more convictions, the sentenc[ing] actually decreases.”

Several years back, my elderly parents, who then lived in a townhouse in a blue-collar Kelowna, B.C. neighbourhood, were forced to endure a 30-something drug-dealing neighbour. One summer day, while visiting my parents, I watched two women in a truck shoot heroin into their arms — heroin they obviously had just bought from next door. I called the police. As I learned, this was hardly the first time the man had been identified as a problem.

Regarding those pundits, such as Black, keen to let people out of prison, or to put fewer convicts into prison in the first place, the onus is on them to show that their proposed reforms would work. The personal safety and property of the public should rank first in any criminal justice system.

While the issue of crime and punishment is worth a debate, Black’s use of the word “reactionary” to describe those who desire tougher, longer sentences is wrong. Actually, such sentiment originates in a civilized and legitimate demand: That existing victims and the at-risk-public are the proper and first focus of political and judicial compassion.

My guess is that many Canadians support longer and more consistent prison sentences for the neighbourhood heroin dealer. I’d further wager that many also support life-long lock-ups of violent predators such as Calf-Child after the first offence.

Mark Milke is the editorial-board chair of Canada’s Journal of Ideas, C2CJournal.ca, where this article first appeared.

Todd Korol / ReutersOn Tuesday, a bullet train set a new speed record for trains that operate on conventional tracks while on a test run from Shanghai to Hangzhou, China.
The Chinese-made CRH380A bullet train went a blistering 416.6 kilometers per hour (258.86 miles per hour), topping the old record of 394.3 km/h, set in China in 2008.
For comparison, Indy cars can reach top racing speeds of around 410 km/h, and Canada's Via Rail lists <a href="http://www.viarail.ca/en/about-via-rail/our-fleet/locomotives-p42dc&quot; target="_blank">their fastest locomotive</a> as having a top speed of 160 km/h.
<!--more-->The Shanghai to Hangzhou train will normally operate at a more pedestrian 350 km/h and is expected to begin operation in 2012.
China already has the world's longest high-speed network with plans to more than double its size to 16,000 kilometres, connecting all its major cities, by 2020, the <a href="http://www.shanghaidaily.com/article/?id=450565&type=Metro&quot; target="_blank"><em>Shanghai Daily</em> reports</a>.
While Canada is still debating <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2008/01/10/rail-study.html&quot; target="_blank">whether or not to get in the game</a>, China, Japan and a handful of European countries are well into a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_by_country#High_Speed_Rail_by_Country&quot; target="_blank">new golden age of rail</a>.
Here is a video, shot from a Japanese <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JR-Maglev&quot; target="_blank">magnetic levitation train</a> which can go faster (record speed is 581 km/h) than those that use a conventional track:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9c11gCf3VM&w=620]

Several years ago, after a day-long hike in Kananaskis country (a magnificent wilderness that abuts Banff National Park), I drove by two vehicles stopped by the side of the mountain highway. The passengers were busily feeding potato chips to a small herd of mountain sheep.

I could have kept driving and cursed the central Canadian tourists under my breath (sorry, but the SUVs had Ontario plates). Or I could have grabbed my cellphone and passed on their licence numbers to park wardens, who might have levied a fine. Instead, I pulled over and gently asked the visitors to stop feeding the sheep. The chips, I explained, would only encourage the animals to trot by the road more often, which could have tragic consequences if a car came around the corner too quickly. The tourists mumbled an embarrassed acknowledgment; I wished them a wonderful stay in the mountains.

Some readers might be surprised that someone like me — a director of Canada’s free-market-oriented Fraser Institute — cares about nature. The conventional narrative is that concern for continued prosperity is necessarily anti-environment; the opposite narrative also exists, whereby self-identified greens want the human race to live in medieval hovels.

However, the real debates on the environment, and our responsibility for it, are more nuanced. They involve useful deliberation about the role of more or less regulation, “carrots” and “sticks” in environmental governance, the role of entrepreneurs and technology in solving problems, and what it takes to make countries prosper so they have the extra wealth to properly care for the natural world. (Dirt-poor Haiti, for example, won’t get serious about green issues until it conquers rampant poverty first.)

So, full confession: I’m a closet tree-hugger. As an undergraduate, I spent three summers tree planting because I preferred the outdoors to an office. Give me a choice now between a glitzy Las Vegas vacation or a hike in the Rockies, and it’s no contest. And on occasion, that requires personal action. When I spot beer cans in the woods, I’ll haul them out and fume at the irresponsible miscreants who brought and tossed them.

Anyone who buys into the easy stereotypes misreads the reality that plenty of “conservative” people are also conservationists. Southern Alberta ranchers, some of the most hard-core, blue fiscal conservatives in the country, are also the most protective of the natural environment. Polluting the land and water is not good for their business. Just as importantly, despoiling nature offends their sense of personal responsibility for the land under their care.

Such ranchers live by their convictions, leaving a far smaller environmental footprint than the Ted Turners and Al Gores of the world, who own multiple mansions and jet-set about while preaching “sustainability.” Instead, the ranchers’ desire to both make a decent living and respect nature is an obvious rebuke to would-be green messiahs, and a positive example for the rest of us.

Related

These days, it’s all too easy to cut a cheque to a green lobby group or blithely assume governments can organize, regulate and direct all matters concerning the environment. The result is that “teaching moments” — such as my encounter with the sheep-feeding tourists — are often lost. So too is a positive personal impact on the preservation of the wild.

The reality of a Canadian preference for rules over responsibility hit home when a friend from New Zealand commented on the plethora of signs posted in our national parks. They listed a slew of prohibited activities, including blasting one’s stereo, feeding animals and littering. “So what’s different in New Zealand?” I inquired. To paraphrase his reply, such behaviour was understood to be unacceptable and dumb. In Kiwi country, signs are fewer and lists shorter because anyone engaged in the above activities would be swiftly reminded by locals to stop. In contrast, we Canadians make a religion out of being “polite” — and shove off responsibility to government.

According to the political logic now in play in Ottawa and too many provincial capitals, foreigners are to be feared — including “foreigners” from other parts of our own country. The decision by the federal Conservative government to reject the Australian mining company BHP Billiton Ltd.’s takeover bid of Potash Corp in Saskatchewan was only the latest in a series of anti-investment moves by a plethora of Canadian governments.

Here’s a partial list: One day before killing BHP Billiton’s proposed takeover, Ottawa blocked a proposed $815-million gold mine in central British Columbia, this on the justification the Taseko mine would have significant environmental impacts. Except that the federal and British Columbia governments already concluded the environmental harm would be minimal. However, despite the B.C. government’s endorsement of the project and the jobs it would create, Environment Minister Jim Prentice snuffed it out.

Subsidizing arenas means putting taxpayers in hock for decades, with zero benefit to the economy

By Mark Milke and Niels Veldhuis

Given the federal government’s past, present and projected future red ink, Canadians could be forgiven for thinking Ottawa might prefer to pinch pennies rather than dole out hundreds of millions more in corporate welfare, this time to the most undeserving recipients of all, pro-sport franchises, most owned by billionaires.

But politics may soon trump economic sense once again. While Prime Minister Stephen Harper said last week that his government will never directly fund professional sports teams, he did leave open the door that taxpayers might be forced to ante up for the facilities such teams play in.

Moreover, his comments this week — he downplayed a federal role but then said “if there is a role for the federal government, it must be equitable across the country and also affordable” did nothing to dispel the possibility of taxpayer-funded largesse for professional sports.

Andy Russell, a Lethbridge, Alta.-born trapper, grizzly bear hunter, photographer, trail guide, rancher and writer, loved the mountains of southern Alberta. In a description of the morning sunrise at the foothills of the Rockies, written in 1973, he characterized the moment as “sudden-bursting life, a marriage of light and life,” when “the mountains light up at first sun in deep rose, swiftly changing to gold, and all shot through with deep purple’s shadow.” It was, he wrote, as if “the whole universe pauses for a long, heart-stretching moment, locked in a spell of deep wonder.”

Such awe at the natural world is at the heart of the Western Canadian experience, and explains much about the West and the optimistic, open spirit that lies at its core. That’s due in part to how nature and life can combine to produce a self-understanding — a “myth” in the best sense of that word — about a region.

The best way to understand this Western experience is to compare it with a narrative from elsewhere.

In 1972, about the same time Russell wrote the words cited above, Margaret Atwood asserted that whether it was early explorers, the French vis-à-vis the English, or English Canada in the 20th century in relation to the United States, “the central symbol of Canada is undoubtedly survival” (my emphasis).

Atwood’s interpretation of her Canada came from the Loyalist experience of what is now southern Ontario (though Montreal and parts of Atlantic Canada also can be included). That culture was born in fear after the American Revolutionary war of 1776, which forced many Loyalists north; it was added to by the War of 1812. The result was a distinct central Canadian narrative — one literary critic Northrop Frye labelled as the “garrison culture,” whereby one is constantly on the defensive and expects an attack.

The survival narrative makes sense in central Canada. It doesn’t apply in the West — not on the foothills near the Rockies or on the flat open plain in Saskatchewan or Manitoba. Instead, the West’s narrative is one of a land freely chosen by immigrants, an open vista both physically and demographically. It is that of the frontier. It contrasts with the densely-packed Canadian shield, where one’s revolutionary enemy (or a grizzly) is more easily hidden — and thus nature’s surprises are more regularly feared than celebrated.

In the West, a thousand natural wonders combined with settler experiences that, though also full of struggles, are interpreted through a positive prism. For example, reflecting on his arrival in southern Alberta in the spring of 1884, the settler John D. Higginbotham described how “the sun was shining from an unclouded sky and was brilliantly reflected from the snow-crowned peaks and sides of distant mountains; the nearer foothills and valleys were all clad in emerald, the sparkling streams — clear and cold — murmuring over their gravely beds, the birds singing on all sides, the grouse, or chicken, drumming as they flew from the pleasant pastures in which they were feeding to give us an inquisitive glance as we rolled long.”

The legendary journalist Bruce Hutchison was similarly awed by the West’s natural wonders. In 1973, he described how, in an ascent up the Canadian Rockies years earlier, sudden winds opened up a stunning panorama: “The sun bored through the concrete, the clouds were torn to fluttering rags of blue and white, the valley of gilded autumn poplar at our feet was emptied instantly of mist. Sky, earth, mountain and forest, rock and tree, were convulsed like the colours in a child’s kaleidoscope. The whole planet (how else can I say it?) turned into a whirling, bubbling molten substance as on the day of creation — a sight too dizzy for human eyes to look upon.” Hutchison conveys the magnificent awe of one faced with nature’s full, raw power. But noticeably absent in his account, and that of the others about their experiences with the West’s natural world, is the chronic foreboding found in early descriptions of man’s encounter with nature in Loyalist Ontario.

Neither experience is better than the other in any objective sense. But comparing the two is telling. For insight into the West’s soul, drive down an isolated road or hike up a peak. Then, look at the delicate alpine flowers or the rushing rivers, the deep blue skies that stretch forever, the mountain lakes or crystal streams, the dry ranch land or yellow canola, the mountains and foothills, or at the mountain goats, or at a sturdy elk or wandering grizzly. The Western experience starts right there.

National Post

Mark Milke is research director for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. Visit Frontier’s website at http://www.fcpp.org.